09/11/2026
Twenty-five years ago today, our nation awoke to a morning that would change the world.
September 11, 2001 changed our country. It changed our communities. And for countless families, it changed the course of their lives forever.
Today, we remember the nearly 3,000 lives taken that morning. We remember the passengers and crews aboard the planes and those working in the buildings they struck. We remember the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and emergency personnel who ran toward danger when every instinct told others to run away.
We remember those who answered our nation's call in the years that followed, some of whom never returned home. And we remember those we have lost more recently to the invisible scars of that day, the illnesses carried by first responders, recovery workers, and others who breathed the air and worked among the ruins.
When America needed help, people came from everywhere. Emergency personnel from across our region answered that call, including members of our own Jamesburg community. They went because someone needed them. They went because that is what service asks of us.
A quarter century has passed, but for many who lived through that September morning, it still feels like yesterday. At the same time, twenty-five years is a lifetime for millions of Americans today who have no firsthand memory of September 11 because they were born after it. I am one of them. I was born several months after the attacks that day and never knew the world before it.
There are those who understandably wonder what happens as September 11 passes from living memory into history. They wonder whether the meaning of that day will fade as generations come of age who never watched the towers fall in New York, never saw the smoke rising over the Pentagon or Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and never experienced the terrible uncertainty of that morning.
To those who wonder, I would offer this: my generation may remember September 11 differently, but we inherit its memory nonetheless.
Ours is also the generation of children whose mothers or fathers never came home. Of nieces and nephews who grew up knowing an aunt or uncle only through pictures and stories. Of families with an empty place where a life once burned so brightly.
And those lives are remembered in places like Jamesburg. In our homes, our families, our churches, and ordinary places made sacred by the memory of the people lost that day and the lives they touched.
None of us born afterward can fully know what it was like to live through September 11. But remembrance has never belonged only to those who witnessed history firsthand. Generations born after Pearl Harbor still remember December 7. Generations born after wars have ended still speak the names of those who never returned.
That is how memory survives. One generation carries it to the next. And now, twenty-five years later, we begin to share in that responsibility.
We have a sacred obligation as Americans to remember those who were taken from us, to honor those who sacrificed, and to tell their stories long after the last person who remembers that morning firsthand is gone.
The passage of time does not diminish that obligation. It makes it more important.
So today, we remember. We remember the lives that were lived, not simply the way they ended. We remember the courage of those who answered the call. We remember the families who carried on.
And we promise that twenty-five years from now, and twenty-five years after that, another generation will stand where we stand today and know why September 11 matters.
May God bless the memory of all those we lost and those who continue to carry the scars of that day.
